At the Friday, Sept. 6th Tavares, FL City Council meeting at 4pm, will rampant spending continue and should the city be renamed Camelot or Spendalot City?
Updated Sept. 6 to clarify several items at the request of City staff. VJ
Yes, tomorrow, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019 at 4pm at City Hall, the Tavares, FL City Council will have their postponed City Council meeting due to Hurricane Dorian, which thankfully missed us.
- This Tavares City Council meeting is a perfect example of why the Tavares City Council is out of control and homeowners & commercial property owners will get hit with high taxes and other issues like high-density annexation in rural Lake County if you don't attend and provide public input. Snowbirds, beware.
- The Tavares City Council keeps spending funds and increasing property taxes by not implementing roll back rates. They should be upfront with citizens and tell them they want expensive buildings, Roman Circuses and a $27-million Performing Arts Center for downtown vs controlling costs like some other Lake County cities (like Minneola). Perhaps the city should be renamed Camelot or Spendalot City!
- The City Council keeps discussing new spending like more Christmas decorations while they still haven't fixed the docks in almost two years, have not broken even on the Pavilion (after accounting for the payments on the building) and plan to increase wastewater invoices by 5.5% for the next two years.
- City staff is excellent, but the City Council RARELY ever questions spending or proposes direction to the staff for the need to control spending indicating it is a low priority. For example, they spent time at TWO meetings just discussing Christmas decorations, but not much on road improvements. So the budget summary for the $74-million budget approval hearing shows they plan to spend only $225,000 (plus grants) for road paving. Until residents replace current City Council members with more fiscally active officials, the spending will continue on mostly downtown projects.
- The City Council is not very transparent, with a small 29 page agenda online, vs the detailed 126-page version you have to request from the City Clerk by email at [email protected] or 352.742.6209. It has all the details why your wastewater rates will go up automatically in the future without any "direction" to reduce costs, or reduce rates vs other high cost Lake County Cities. (agenda item 5)
- The Council still will not improve transparency by authorizing funds for staff to record videos of main meetings and planning & zoning meetings, so I continue to make videos and post them on my FiscalRangersFlorida YouTube channel. It is time that Tavares (and all Lake County cities) make live videos of at least the main Council meeting and the Planning & Zoning meetings.
- Unlike most cities, the Tavares City Council reduces transparency over proposed Ordinances like rezonings because they will not hear "first hearing" public input on ordinances, and yet the agenda does not warn readers, who come to give input at first hearings, are denied and leave frustrated. Thus the Council avoids public input and discussion with new information that could result in a modified Ordinance for the second reading. The result is that the public can only speak at the second hearings when the Council usually has their minds made up. Thus, for this agenda, item 5 is about a proposed rate hike for water and wastewater rates, but the details are not in the online agenda, and the Council will not allow any input until the final hearing which is usually too late.
- Most City Council members seem to be focused on just downtown Tavares but they keep annexing more County areas and yet won't accept road maintenance responsibilities for them. Agenda Tab 6 is an update on the Recreation Division. It lists a number of programs. it is not clear whether they are ALL in downtown Tavares, and are not spread out among the outlying Tavares communities. Until they indicate locations of all programs, we assume they are all in downtown. Thus are outlying taxpayers subsidizing programs for downtown only? One way to fix that is like Fruitland Park - changing to geographic DISTRICT based City Council elections. Thus outlying areas would elect their own representatives to ensure spending is spread out among all residents & businesses. Clermont also considered such a change because the City Council is controlled not by downtowners, but officials elected by three large retirement communities.
- The proposed millage rate of 6.950 is buried in the Agenda item 7 hearing summary and is a small reduction from the current 7.1119, but not the rollback rate of 6.7733. However, due to increased property valuations by the Lake County Property Appraiser (see your Trim Notice), most homesteaded homeowner tax increases will be capped at 3% while commercial or second homeowners could get hit with much higher taxes. To analyze and understand what is proposed, you have to read the agenda item summary AND the attached ordinance text.
- The Budget summary to be approved by the City Council on the agenda for item 7 lists many spending items. Almost all of them are for DOWNTOWN or staff, and not the outlying areas. Thus last year they approved staff wage increases of 5% and this year, 3.75%. Did YOU get increases that big? Meanwhile, over local opposition, they approved annexation of two large, high-density developments in unincorporated areas where the neighbors cannot vote for City Council.
- The Tavares City Council does not require budgets be presented at these final hearings with 3-5 years of data for each line item. That is a standard practice in most competent businesses. Tavares does not do that in these hearings or attachments, so you can't really see what went up or down. That information is available from the Finance Director, but not published in these agenda summaries where decisions are made. Then you wonder if ANY of the City Council actually requested and reviewed spending trends over time. However, the new Lake County School District shows 5-year budget comparisons.
- The budget summaries lump highly fluctuating capital costs, revenue sources and other one time items into a single column, and without prior period comparisons, you can't see where the cash flow changed. It is a way for the City Council to avoid transparency and accountability for wild fluctuations in spending. In contrast, for instance, the new proposed budget book for the Lake County School district separates out capital and other types of revenue and spending in SEPARATE COLUMNS so you can more easily see changes and know that a one-off capital spending budget is not mixed in with routine spending.
So on Friday, Sept. 6, the Tavares City Council will have their normal Council meeting, but then also the first of two required public hearings at 5 pm to discuss planned increases in the annual budget and planned increased tax collections (by not rolling millage rates back). As local property owners should know, in Florida, the City Councils must earlier decide on a maximum millage rate and budget totals for advertising the hearings. But, they did not approve using the "rollback" rate which would be a lower millage rate that would generate the same revenue as the prior year. Some millage increase over rollback may be needed to provide for population growth, but analysis supporting that justified millage increase is not apparent in the hearing documents.
If you want to see the SHORT, 29-page version of the meeting agenda, you can find it here:
https://www.tavares.org/902/Current-Agendas-Minutes
But, the City Council is not very transparent in providing agenda details or on the millage and budget decisions. The above 29-page version doesn't include clear details on many items, including the millage and budget hearings. To get the more detailed 126-page meeting packet, you have to email the City Clerk, Suzie Novak, at [email protected] or 352.742.6209.
If Tavares and nearby residents don't attend Tavares City Council meetings to question the budgets and agenda items, you will get what the Camelot City Council wants - more spending and less transparency.
As your local FiscalRangers.com watchdog, I will tell you what the local newspapers and TV stations never do. Here is what you can do:
If you like the spending that Tavares does, and lack of transparency, then tell the City Council and rename it Camelot. Do the same for the County (another story) or other cities in Lake County.
If you don't like the spending or the excess annexation of high-density developments next to single-family or rural homes, then attend all City Council meetings, read the agenda and tell them.
If you think the City Council should be more transparent, then tell them to support actions like:
- funding of STAFF created meeting videos of both the Council and Planning & Zoning meetings,
- separation of budget categories like capital items from others like general fund for clarity,
- posting of five-year revenue & spending trends in all budget line items, and
- posting of the FULL budget packets given to the City Council on the website.
And, if you live in Lake County unincorporated rural areas near Tavares, and are concerned about high-density annexation next door...
- TELL them, and
- demand they improve rezoning notification procedures like many have suggested, and
- demand that Council Districts be changed to geographic districts where non-downtown interests are also represented.
Vance Jochim
FiscalRangers.com - the Lake County, FL Fiscal Watchdog
Videos at: https://www.youtube.com/FiscalRangersFlorida
